What Kind of Flaw is Loyalty, Anyway?
by YellowWomanontheBrink
Summary: POV Outsider. Pre-HoO. Technically AU? Two Campers gossip about fatal flaws. NOT Percy/OC.


**Hey there! YellowWomanontheBrink here! Found this little introspection piece from way back in the day, hope you enjoy a little pov outsider. This was initially written before Heroes of Olympus came out (yeet this is old) and cleaned up and pretty much rewritten to meet my current writing standards. Lemme know what you think?**

To the Greeks, a fatal flaw was something terribly personal. It was the secret to a hero's downfall, the weakness of the gods, the step-by-step instruction manual to a person's destruction. It was the opening of the path to one's most tragic conclusion and enduring misery. Conquer your flaw and you'd conquer your fate.

Naturally, being an important figure to all the Greeks at the Camp Half-blood, everyone (or at least, the counselors, and from there the other demigods ) knew exactly what made Percy Jackson tick.

He was an imposing figure; tall and leanly muscled, with crazy dark hair, wilder eyes, and tanned skin crisscrossed with paler scars he wore without pride. He seemed to operate without fear, and teach with utmost patience, smile freely and act as quick as he smiled. Even as the Camp rapidly expanded, he made it a point to interact with every new Camper, and it seemed like more and more popped out from the mire every single day; some, he brought back himself.

He seemed indomitable, so it was curious when word got around that his fatal flaw was a trait that hardly seemed like a flaw at all.

"Loyalty?" Amalthea, a daughter of Ares asked incredulously as she sat down at the campfire-well, at the well-loved picnic table. She shoveled a French fry into her mouth. "What kind of a flaw is that? Not too bad of one if you ask me."

Grace, a daughter of Nike who'd had six boyfriends, shrugged. "I wish Hernando had been cursed with loyalty. Then I wouldn't have had to trash his cheating ass at capture the flag last week."

Amalthea looked up; across the field with the rest of the Hephaestus kids sat Grace's ex, staring at her mournfully. The two of them giggled when Grace caught his eye and smirked.

"I dunno mine yet," Amalthea picked at her chicken tenders thoughtfully. "I know Clarisse's though."

Grace leaned over, her brown lips bared in an eager grin. "Ooh, tell me!"

"I mean...it's supposed to be kept between Ares' kids only..."

"Bitch, don't pull that line on me. I told you what Percy's was!"

Amalthea shrugged. "I mean...Percy doesn't really have a cabin to keep it to...like, the whole Camp is practically his cabin."

" _Amalthea."_

"Fine, fine," Amalthea looked left and right suspiciously; the two of them were in a fairly secluded table. "It's jealousy."

"Clarisse? Jealousy?" Grace clapped her hands to her mouth and squealed into the muffle. "Who would have thought?!"

"Tell the whole damn camp I told you, please," Amalthea buried her face into her arms with a moan.

Grace waved her off. "It's whatever. Besides, Clarisse seems to have her flaw handled. It probably won't kill her tomorrow."

"What does knowing about a flaw have anything to do with it being a flaw?" Amalthea frowned. "I don't see how loyalty can bring about anyone's downfall, it's a virtue, isn't it?"

Grace tore into another piece of chicken and shrugged. "Yeah. So's ambition, and you get envy out if that. Pride becomes hubris. Love becomes possessiveness. Every rose has it's thorns. Good stuff like that can be bad."

"But..."

Grace sighed loudly. "Girl, you've only been here for two weeks. Me? Try three years. And we found out Percy's flaw what, two years ago? You don't know the first thing about Percy Jackson till you've seen him fight. I werent't nothing special at New York, just another body in armor trying not to get killed. I wasn't even claimed then. Nope, no glory for me. But I saw what unfaltering loyalty does to a person. It eats you up. You'd do anything, even hurt yourself for that person-for that cause. Don't mean shit if that person ain't gonna back it up. You get a pawn, a very powerful pawn for the gods to play with." She breathed out hard through her nose. Her hands trembled where it lay on top of her unused fork. "And the gods ain't loyal to nobody, 'specially not their kids."

Amalthea was quiet for a long while. She was new, incredibly new, and while the Ares cabin was rough, she'd always found herself enamored with roughness. She liked her wood unsanded and her gems unbuffed, and she'd found beauty in violence ever she'd bathed in the blood from her sister's decapitation two months ago in the accident she'd lost her family in.

But this unsettled her. Grace stared at her questioningly, her fry held aloft and forgotten.

"Amalthea?" the other girl asked. "You good?"

Amalthea reached over and took a long drink of water-she didn't like anything else enough to make the cup fill with another drink-and sorted out her feelings.

"Do you think he'd destroy himself if someone he loved asked?" she questioned. At the dark twist of Grace's puckish mouth she persisted, "I'm serious!"

"...yeah. Have you seen the way he looks at his girl? Like she hung the moon and stars. I think he'd destroy everything if he really thought he had to."

Amalthea frowned. "Why would you think that? Not even the Titanomachy could destroy everything, and they _created_ everything!"

Grace fidgeted in her seat. "'A hero cannot defy his fate' they say," she began solemnly, her voice deeper than usual, heavy with an ache Amalthea could not identify. "Like the future be set in stone or something. But that's a lie. A hero driven by his flaw can defy his fate. Achilles nearly brought down Troy singlehandedly in his rage. And Apollo didn't guide Paris's arrow when the son of Priam took his revenge. The winter of Stalingrad was no happy accident. I'm a daughter of Nike, and my powers ain't good for much but I know when someone's gonna lose. I know victory like an old hurt in my bones, and at New York, we were supposed to lose. We were meant to be defeated. But that faith-" she shuddered. "-it's frightening. _He_ scares me."

Amalthea pursed her lips in thought. Percy was hardly someone frightening-for all the imposing figure had cut from afar, Amalthea had seen bigger men, stronger Campers, and meaner eyes. (She looked in the mirror every single morning after all.)

"He's not so scary," she said. "Like, I know he's the son of Poseidon and all, but-"

Grace shook her head vehemently. " _It's not that_. If powerful were all he were, fine-he's _achaius_ Amalthea. The sea cannot be tamed, but by weaving that flaw into his strand the Fates took a damn gamble trying to preserve the status quo."

 _Achaius_ , she'd said. The greatest, the divine part of her soul whispered back at her. An inherently arrogant title Percy didn't willingly bear, at least, not if what she'd heard of him and his humility was true, that meant more than just being able to fight.

It spoke of being the most powerful, the most _divine_ of a generation. It spoke of bearing the heaviest burdens and greatest glories gifted by the gods. It was a title no demigod had borne since the days of ancient heroes; it had cropped up again and again in her time at the Camp, but never in front of Percy's face.

"The greatest," she said quietly to herself, "why do you think it was a gamble?"

"I'm no Oracle," Grace shrugged, "but I know when someone's gonna lose. Something bad is gonna happen to him, I know it. And it's his loyalty-lack of self-preservation here-that's gonna lead him to it. He won't die because he's weak, he'll die compensating for someone else's weakness. He'll die because he won't be able to make a sacrifice when it matters."

They sat pensively in silence for what felt like forever when an unfamiliar voice snapped them out of their thoughts.

"Whoa," a broadly accented voice sounded behind her, " I was gonna ask if I could sit with you two, but maybe I should ask who died instead."

Amalthea looked up from the plate she hadn't realized she'd been staring at to meet dark green eyes. The firelight flickered dangerously in them, and painted sinister shadows over a sharp, shapely face.

One long eyebrow cocked questioningly.

Amalthea rushed to move her solitary bag from the chair beside her when she realized she was staring into the face of Percy Jackson himself.

Speak if the devil and he shall appear, she thought wryly.

He slid in gracefully; and she watched whipcord muscles flex as he settled with ease into the empty space beside her.

"Hey Grace," he drawled. "How're ya doing?"

"Greatthanks," she said it all as one word, picking nervously at her fries.

He hummed in acceptance at her answer, before turning his attention on Grace.

"You I don't know," he gave her an easy smile and stuck out one calloused hand. "Percy Jackson."

Amalthea took it a second too late. "Amalthea Little." Another pause. "I'm a daughter of Ares."

"Cool," he said. "I saw you looking at the forest the other day. Have you been to the lake?"

"No," she said easily, as if she hadn't been gossiping about his downfall just seconds before, "I haven't. I'm not really much for swimming."

They made small talk for another twenty minutes. Grace was more subdued than usual, but Percy's casual and easygoing countenance overcame even her reticence, and she opened up gradually. Amalthea was rarely happy, in fact she rarely felt anything at all, but there was something about the eager way Percy met her eyes and was genuinely interested in her sometimes awkwards replies that made her spill her guts.

With a blinding, but infuriatingly crooked smile (Amalthea liked her thing orderly and routine) he departed. A small grin lingered on her face as she admired his beauty from behind (and as she admired his beautiful behind). Grace had managed to finish her fries and was eyeing Hernando mournfully across the table.

"...I can't see how he frightens you," Amalthea said. "He's really nice." She paused. "Really nice."

"Please," Grace said, "Don't even try to crush, girl. He's practically married, and Annabeth can kick my ass to Crete. If I wanna fuck, I'll look for a Hephaestus boy. They have nice arms." she grinned wryly.

"I wasn't talking about looks— though he is pretty, mmm— I mean he's..welcoming. It's different, coming here, you know?" Amalthea blinked away sudden tears, the image of her sister's body in the vacant chair Percy had just abdicated. "I think...I think that was the first normal conversation I've had since I got here."

"It's nice," Grace agreed. "He didn't always use to do that, you know. Only after the war. Only after all the faceless people were dead."

"I think I would just want everybody to remain faceless, then." she shuddered. Bad enough that she knew Lira and her mother and her father among the dead. She didn't care to know anymore half-bloods than Grace. Grace, the lone daughter of Nike, with her charioteering and intuition being the only skills to her name.

Unthreatening Grace. Safe Grace.

"But that's why he's the Achaius, and not you, and not me," Grace sighed, looking away from Hernando. "I trust too much in my powers. You don't trust anything at all. And we're both afraid because of it. Percy cares about this camp, and he loves the gods. But I think he loves their children more. So for the first time, someone powerful enough to matter gives a shit about us. That's why I fought in New York. That's why I'll fight again, and I'd follow him, even against my instinct. Cause if he's frightening me, he's scaring my enemies more, and that's fine with me."

"I want to see him again," Amalthea said, brow furrowed. She didn't realize it was true until she said it.

Grace snorted. "Bitch, you have two options. You gonna pick up a sword, or you gonna pick up a paddle."

Muscles aching from the very thought of more combat practice— the first week of adjusting to Ares cabin was hell, and the second and third not much better— she grimaced. "Looks like I'm about to learn how to swim then."

Grace snorted and Amalthea grinned, and the two of them decided to retreat to the porch behind the Big House, leaving behind thoughts of fatal flaw and doomed half-bloods.

 **Well, that's that! Hope you like it. ^_^**

**YellowWomanontheBrink**

 **1:07 am**

 **May 15, 2017**


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